In a pair of research papers presented at the 2017 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence held in Melbourne, Australia last week, IBM submitted two studies: one looking into how to grant AI an “attention span”, the other examining how to apply the biological process of neurogenesis — that is, the birth and death of neurons — to machine learning systems.

“Neural network learning is typically engineered and it’s a lot of work to actually come up with a specific architecture that works best. It’s pretty much a trial and error approach,” Irina Rish, an IBM research staff member, told Engadget. “It would be good if those networks could build themselves.”

Source: IBM is teaching AI to behave more like the human brain